Completed August 31, 2004 |
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| This wallhanging is my first collaborative project with my mother-in-law, Kathy. She does beautiful embroidery work, and we decided to combine our efforts to make a thank-you gift for her dear friends Bill and Phyllis, who had hosted both of our families when we were in Lexington.
As we were brainstorming ideas for this gift, I recalled a wallhanging my mother had made in the past. She found a pattern from Son Shine Seed Co. that had a sweet phase she liked. The original pattern she purchased looked like this: |
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When my mom used the pattern for her friend Sue, she changed the stitched houses to appliqued birdhouses (Sue has a birdhouse-themed room) and added a patchwork border: |
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 Kathy and I liked this idea, so she searched for birdhouse embroidery/applique designs. She found these two beautiful designs at Un-FROG-ettable Designs: |
 We decided to go with them. We found a beautiful floral print that had flowers in similar shapes and colors to the applique designs. I went to one of my favorite fabric stores to search for wood prints to use for the houses, and coordinating tone-on-tone prints for the patchwork border. Kathy used her embroidery machine to do the two appliques and the text (which we slightly reworded). Then I put them together, pieced the border and quilted it. |
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For all of the quilts I made previously, I just used a permanent fabric marker to label the back of the quilt. In a few cases I have had to applique the label since the backing fabric was too dark or too busy. That was the case with this wallhanging. Since I knew we would have to applique anyway, I suggested to Kathy that she embroider a label to applique on the back. We were pleased with the results: |
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